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For 12 years, the Mesa Civic Center was the largest facility of its kind in Arizona. It hosted thousands of events such as the Maricopa County Fair, flower shows and church events.

The former military hangar, decommissioned after WWII, was dismantled, moved and reassembled just north of the Maricopa Inn, now the City Hall site, at First Street and Center. But on the morning of Feb. 20, 1959, an attic fire of undetermined origin quickly destroyed the structure in one of the biggest conflagrations in Mesa history.

In a 1977 history of the Civic Center, Tanya Collins, Mesa public information officer, described the confusion after the fire. "Community organizations scrambled to adjust to the loss, rescheduling events or canceling them, searching for space where there was none, trying to make do. Fraternal groups rented their lodges out, clubs shared their limited meeting rooms, schools opened their cafeterias and auditoriums," she wrote. "And Mesans, in the back of their minds, began dreaming of a new community center."

The effort took hold in earnest when the Chamber of Commerce conducted a community survey in 1961. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of a new civic center.

Even with nearly universal support for a new facility, things were agonizingly stalled for years.

Finally, in September 1969, more than a decade after the fire, the City Council appointed the Civic Center Study Committee to come up with a plan.

Four months later, the conclusion was emphatic, "Get started immediately on a plan and make some progress before the centennial year of 1978."

It was further recommended, "That any building should be within the original square mile in order to maintain the downtown area, and that Rendezvous Park should be the center of any development."

More time passed.

Plans for a new facility suffered a stunning setback in 1974, when Mesa voters rejected a bond proposal by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.

It was back to the drawing board. Leaders decided to fund the project with cash, not bonds. More delay.

Finally, in 1976, with enough money saved, the demolition of the old ballfield at Rendezvous Park, and the aging of the recreational area in general, plans for a new Civic Center and an amphitheater moved forward in earnest.

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On Feb. 14, 1978, 19 years after fire destroyed Mesa's pioneering first Civic Center, the city at long last had the new, modern 38,000-square-foot Centennial Hall — just in time for Mesa's 100th anniversary.